


not a star in the sky that's got our name

by cicak



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Agnes remains my favourite, Character Study, F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Synths, Trauma, original synth character - Freeform, post season one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:13:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23358322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: The rest of her life goes something like this.
Relationships: Agnes Jurati/Cristóbal Rios
Comments: 29
Kudos: 64





	not a star in the sky that's got our name

The pretrial goes like this.

She's put in a scanner a couple of days before, arranged by her lawyer. It’s quick and simple, done at her local hospital in Okinawa by a kindly old imaging lecturer at the local university. They’re so busy chatting about mutual friends that she forgets to ask to look at the images or get a copy of them for herself. It shouldn’t matter; she knows the diagnosis, knows the arguments they’re going to put forward. She’s prepared for them to rip her life open to try and save it.

In the court-room, the scans are shown to everyone. Her intake scans from Starfleet Academy are shown first, a 20 year old’s brain straight out of a textbook, and a matching scan of her psyche, a calm blue ocean of a perfect, inert, human psinull.

When her lawyer flips to the next slide, the press and collective supporters make a noise straight out of a movie, a perfect second of collective shock, a gasp of horror.

There's a rip, across her frontal and temporal lobes, jagged and curving like a smile cut with a serrated edge, torn and ragged, scar tissue lit up in white on the scan. Her calm blue psyche is replaced with a sickly rainbow of colours, red and purple and green like a bruise.

"A forced meld is a violation", her lawyer says, and gets a specialist up to take them through it, neuron by neuron.

It’s shocking to everyone, but especially to Agnes, who has always been a visual learner.

Her lawyer had told her what to say when the prosecution inevitably went for her personal life. She'll be asked her about the breakup, about Maddox’s part in the destruction of Mars, his recklessness with the synths, about her own responsibility in that tragedy. "They'll try and change the subject", her lawyer says, "but you mustn’t take the blame for things that you're not on trial for. Remember what you're entitled to be angry about. You’re allowed to have a bad breakup, Agnes. You’re allowed to be angry, even fifteen years later. But you didn’t kill him because he broke up with you when you were in your twenties. You killed him because an insane Romulan cultist violated your brain and made you try and take the blame for things that were not your responsibility. Remind them that you’re forty three, for god’s sake. You're an adult. You were used."

Ultimately, all of that preparation was unnecessary, in light of the scans. The law is clear on what counts as a legally sound mind, and so after a short break, the judge stood up and dismissed the charges, and just like that, she's free to go.

It's a crisp spring day on the Starfleet campus, the ocean wind salty and bracing as it blows it off the bay. They've all come to support her, Picard and Raffi and Elnor and Seven and Soji, this little crew. They walk back to the transporter, the Admiral chatting to his housekeepers about arranging a lunch back at the vinyard for all of them, and she's walking back hand in hand with Rios, who is maybe her boyfriend now.

It was three weeks, in total, between the admiral turning up as she was coming back from her lunch break, telling her that her dreams were real, and her downloading him into a functioning synth body, birthing him anew. Over those three weeks she got mind raped by the head of Starfleet security, given the secrets of the universe, killed her first love, met a real life perfect, bioidentical synthetic, slept with a guy to distract him from her crimes, saved the galaxy and is now barely able to open her comm without people trying to give her funding?

The weirdest part of it is probably Rios, somehow.

“You know I slept with you to distract you”, she says one night when she’s feeling bitchy and overtired and jonesing for a fight. It had been a long day, and she is sick and tired of everything in a nonspecific, itchy way.

“Yeah, the first time”, he grins, not looking up, lounging on her couch in the sticky Japanese heat with his top off, sweats hanging low, watching the game on his PADD. “That doesn't explain the other twenty three times you’ve slept with me.”

“You're such a nerd,” she rolls her eyes, throwing the dishes into the reclaimer with force that makes the machine beep at her disapprovingly. “Who counts how many times they've had sex? Were you ugly in high school? Did the cheerleader tease you about it?”

“We don't have cheerleaders at soccer games. We have mascots in fuzzy costumes who get in fights.” He pauses the game, gets up and kisses her until her irritation at him turns predictably into lust and sweat and friction, until twenty minutes later he yells “TWENTY FOUR” as she comes, because he's a troll and she loves him for it.

(Turns out he was beautiful in high school, as his mother shows her in the family holo album, later that autumn. She turns off her UT and let's the rhythm of their good natured family bickering wash over her, warm and temporarily incomprehensible.

Her family are small and weird, her dad long dead and her mum remarried to a guy Agnes has only met a handful of times. They go for dinner, next time she's in town, and she introduces them to Rios as Cris, her boyfriend without even thinking about it, without any doubt, and dinner, which could have been awkward and tense, was just a delight, with good food, no one getting drunk or bitchy, and she tells the story again with the edges filed off, of Soji and Dahj and Sutra and the end of the world.)

Neurorehab of forced melds is too rare a speciality to have a permanent neurologist at Starfleet Medical. Originally, Agnes is told she'll have to go to Vulcan for treatment, do it inpatient over a few months, and she resigns herself to that, starts to get her affairs in order, but then Starfleet medical has a change of heart, and sends a team to her so she can do it outpatient over at headquarters. One a week, she takes the transport there for her 1:30 appointment, walks through the campus, fog rolling off the bay, coffee in hand, and spends twenty minutes with a psychic healer, a prenaturally calm woman called T’Sena, whose mental presence is a thick unguent cream to her sore mind.

She had the physical damage repaired at the start of her treatment, after a lot of talking. She doesn't want to forget what happened. The experience was horrible and brutal but she can't pretend it didn't happen, because it changed her, not just physically, the way everyone saw at the trial, but fundamentally. The Agnes that lived before is gone, she’s dead, she’ll never come back, and Agnes explains to the healer that she doesn’t want her back. She wants the pain gone, she wants the damage to stop, but there’s no way to just go back to who she was before the meld, before the murder, before her attempted suicide.

It is easier to talk to the Vulcan healer who doesn’t care about her feelings, than her Starfleet appointed trauma psychiatrist, who cares way too much and talks about recovery like it can all be swept under the rug. He’s the best in the business, but he doesn’t get it, doesn’t understand how she may not be legally liable for what happened, but she wasn’t hypnotised or possessed. She made the decisions herself, she made the mistakes, and she finds herself in a loop of wanting to unpick all her stitches and reopen the wounds so she can atone, prostrate herself, be punished enough to satisfy her guilt, and maybe finally purge it.

When she said this to Doctor Verdi, he pursed his lips and nodded and talked about forgiveness coming from within, about time, about how none of this was her fault. When she said this to Healer Soreen, he nodded and pulled up her scans, and talked her through the procedure he recommended, pointed to the parts of the brain that were still inflamed, the cells stuck in perpetual damage, and how he would heal them, but leave the scar there.

“You can’t go back, Doctor Jurati”, Healer Soreen said, “but I think we can help you to move forward.”

Towards the end of treatment, she literally bumps into one of the synths on the way back to the transporter station. They go for coffee, and the synth introduces herself as Nesta with a broad smile and effusive friendliness. She’s small and pretty, the red of her cadet uniform contrasting richly with the gold of her skin and the darkness of her hair, pulled back tight in the cadet chignon Agnes knows all too well. They talk for an hour about the academy over boba tea that Nesta finds fascinating and delicious. Nesta is interested in the operations track, partly to follow in Data’s footsteps, and partly because she is fascinated by the way the world, the galaxy, the universe works.

As they part, Nesta hugs her. “Thank you,” she says. “I never got to meet you back at home, but Bruce always liked to talk about you. He said I was the closest he’d got to where he wanted to get, and named me accordingly. He said I was never going to be the pinnacle” she gestured to her gold skin and eyes, “but I was the last one made before they made Dahj and Soji. Bruce called me “the dress rehearsal”, but I don’t think that’s right. He thought of them as the pinnacle, but they were really the start of something new. I like to think of myself as the last golden child, instead.” She smiles, contentedness and quiet self-assurance radiating off her warm and dazzling.

They say goodbye, make plans to meet again the next month, Nesta rushing off to her 15:00 engineering lab, and Agnes walks to the transporter pad the long way, through the manicured gardens and mature avenues, and thinks about creation and birth and the decisions we make, until her communicator chirps with Rios bugging her about dinner plans.

Later that night, Rios snoring gently behind her, Agnes opens up her PADD and searches for Nesta on a baby names website, and smiles to herself.

**Author's Note:**

> Nesta, according to my personal favourite baby name site, is a Welsh diminutive of Agnes. 
> 
> Title from [Psychotherapy by The Jezabels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GzPlCgUQuE), which honestly is an extremely fitting song for this show, even if the lyric I've used is a minor mishear, whatever. I think this is the fifth fic I've named after a lyric from this album, what a tour de force.
> 
> This is the third of my Agnes character studies, the others being [a knife in the country](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22832326) and [red to port, green to starboard, white to guide the way](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22943977). A lot of this comes from my own experience in recovery from PTSD, which has been a long decade in the making.
> 
> (and yes, I named the Vulcan healer after malted fruit loaf, no regrets.)


End file.
